First off: I very mcuh like how diplomacy, food and naval tiles have improved (giving ships a buit more to do and places to go)

Here are my findigns on what might need improvement:

1.Pacifist symbol should be replaced with palm for animals and the horned helmet for barbarian cities. In case of the latter it makes all the less sense to havea pacifist symbol in the shield as that is usually where the owner is displayed but here it shows a kind of attitude attribute which is inconsistent. Also note pacifist symbol is very recent creation and does notmake sense for animals nor minor factions. On the other hand both the palm and horned helmet symbols are experty deisgned and instantly recognisable

2. Deeds are very hard to get to and read so wasnt paying attention to these. Please integrate to the main fame screen (reduce the number if needed)  or would suggest to drop it

3. Responsiveness is very slow for units moving around and sometimes that of Avatars in diplomacy. Notifications should also be expanding at double speed at least

4. All religious tenets should be displayed on the same screen. I have a monitor with a good meter width and need to scroll for a submenu of a subfunction in 4K - This all can fit into a single A4 page at HD

5. Expansion of coastal tiles is a welcome change and enables true exploration with naval units instead of just around the continent and being blocked by other factions BUT please note:

- There are very few anomalies (suggest weather anomalies, sunken ships make little sense early in the game but cna be used later)

- Naval units should be able to establish outposts just like land units: the cost of these due to distance from territories and the fact that they would only be created on the coast and would nee to be resettled later to gea more optimal location more then makes up for the benefits they would provide by giving naval units a huge role in expansion and massively reducing micro-MGMT of having to sent a cheap unit out to an already discovered lication just to smack down an outpost while the ships are fiddling their thumbs when they have nothing omre to explore

- Dont use lake tiles at all and if so they should be very rare, visually more engaging and do not allow construction of harbots (his jsut invites AI issues). As is they can be cut and have interesting terrain instead

- Some restrained is necessary when creating the sea protrusions into the continents: yes these formations provide opportunities for naval gameplay but they also slice up valuable land. The number and depth of these sea portusion needs to be kept to a low level and high standard meaning: max 3-4 per continent and never having a sea width of only 1 tile. Having less but more meaningfull protrusions provides space for naval gameplay without detracting from land battles and expansion. The current map was still ok but was very close in slicing up the continents too much

6. Empire borders feel unnatural where even borderes that paractically go in a straight line have a symmertric zig-zag in them. They should follow the terrain and have more chaotic lines if possible

7. Coastal waters controlled by an empire should not be colored on the high levle overview (or colored differently) to allow clear overview on the shape of continents and islands and that of empires

8. Option to make units move faster on campaign map would be welcome (same as in battles)

9. Reinforcements cannot join an ongoing battle (or I didnt manage to figure out how) - this is needed to allow reinforcement of besieged settlements and feeding in troops into large scale battles. I am hoping this mechanic (and the turn limit of 3 per battle) will result in prolonged battles especialyl in modern age aking to Napoleonic, WW2 and WW2 war frontlines

10. AI was consantly buying resources from me but I never got the feeling I get any money from this and looking at the breakdown of income there was no income type from trading.

11. After pushing an AI into vassal state it started paying +800 coin per turn - this might have been a tad much for Middle Age

12. When surrounded the enemy army can only spawn a single unit - once that is destroyed they loose the battle. I dont think this makes much sense and they should either get space to deploy or the battle should not end when they still ahve reserves

Vassal icon is not self-explanatory: a symbol of shackles used in the diplomacy background screen or a nkieing subject below their facton symbol woudl look much better

13. Propose to have a retreat option every 3 turns in a battle to allow an army to disengage after a while: Again enabling for shifting frontlines

14. Archers were unable to fire up on elevation many times

15. Lots of balancing questions I am sure will change but just to note a few thigns here: I didnt feel the need to build any infrastructure at all as stabiltiy was in abundance, not sure how a farming district effects max pop count and my tech tree progress was waaaaay behind my era: I was a full era behind in technology which made era specific units and especially culture specific ones very strange in the game - never got a feeling that I am actualy playing an era due to this

+1: Still didnt know how to tell how many garisoned defnese units a city has and what their tech level is

Propose to display this information somewhere also for enemy and players own settlements so we can estiamte if we have sufficient force in a location to defend agaisnt an incoming army with specific units

Optionally it woudl be cool to have infrastructure or districts that icnrease garrison by +1 unit of various types

Regarding tech and era progression: the core balancing issue here is that previous CIV games tied Era progression directly to tech (it was simply a way of organising tech)

But in HK, era progression is tied to a completely different system that is largely independant from tech progression while tech still being tied to era

Since era progression is way faster then tech progression, tech is constantly doing catching up and the player is frequently upgrading to previous era units. Note that since tech is also tied into previous era pre-reqs, it is also not possible to skip tech (unlike in Endless Legend)

There are many ways this can be properly balanced but a solution needs to be taken:

1. Eliminate pre-requisites of all Tier 1 techs in each era. Meaning: as soon as a faction jumps era and culture they are abel to research all Tier 1 techs of the new era to reduce the tech lag. This is basically the Endless Legend formula with some hierarchy left in place within the eras themselves

2. Massively increase star requirements for ear progression. The number of stars are already optimal it is not recommended increasing their amount but aquisition of each star could be made around 50-100% more difficult. This would extend the time each faction spends in each era by 50-100% and thus the overall gametime from 200-250 to 400-500 turns but would allow tech to progress fast enough for each era. The next point is probabyl more preferable due to the massive effect this solution would have on overall gametime which most might not enjoy

3. Reduce research time for tier 2 and tier 3 tech. Instead of doubling the time needed for consequent tech, it could be +50% instead. Meaning  that if Tier 1 tech would take 4 turns, tier 2 of the same era would take 6 and tier 3 woudl take 9 tuns. This woul cut down the massive times requirement of higher levle techs within each era and the priamry cause of tech progression being so far behind the game and era progression

4. Tie era progression to stars as well as tech progression. Simple approach but with the current balance it would lead to defacto tech progression dependency only

None of these approaches are difficult to pull of but I wish the DEVs would commit to one so we can see how the game woulf fair in a balanced star and tech progression setup

To this previous point about tech, I think it is worth noting that the current turn limit is 150 and we are given access to four full eras in that time.  The general game length is more in the 300 turn range, thus the eras will be much, much more spread out.  The speed of tech progression starts to make sense if we assume eras will be longer in the actual release.

If that is the case then thats good

I just ran a game with research focus in every era: could easily reaserch everything in Ancient Era but then couldnt keep up with the eras in tech (at turn 100 was still researching the first Medievel era tech despite my culture having entered the era over 20 turns ago)

But I was wondering: Why are culture and Era coupled together here?

Tech progression does not seem to be tied in any way to Culture/Era phase: I can reasearch tech from a higher Era and cant reasearch tech from the new Era by itself

The only connection seems to be the unique culture unit which is tied to a particular Era but evne that is offset if you onyl get to the unit when you are already playing a ne culture :)

So what if Era would not be designated at all or at least not on the culture level?

There can stil lbe Era groups for tech and it might even be displayed for the empire in which tech era they are generally located but Culture and Tech Era could be nominally  decoupled. Would solve a lot of anacronistic scenarios as well as you could be playing a culture in an era that was before or after its golden age and the game woudl accoutn for that